Strong opinions. Candid advice.

Myths That MarTech Vendors Tell Themselves

6-Jul-2018

Awhile back I led an exposé of "Ten Myths MarTech Vendors Tell." (You can stream the recording here.) It got me thinking: myths are things that we tell ourselves to account for things we don't know or understand. Not surprisingly major marketing cloud vendors tell themselves a lot of myths. Should you care? I think so.

The "Big Four" marketing cloud vendors — Adobe, IBM, Oracle, and Salesforce — each like to tell a story around what they're about. Sometimes those stories are real, but oftentimes they're mythical. For more in-depth evaluations of these four and twenty more MarTech players, check out RSG's hard-hitting vendor evaluation report.

Let's take a look at each.

Adobe

Adobe likes to believe that it offers cutting-edge technology specially geared to the creative marketer.

Like all myths, there is some truth to this story. In reality, Adobe will push the envelope on new technology, but also has a tendency to chase technical fads in ways that will give your architects whiplash.

Also, the Adobe "Cloud" is actually a mish-mash of (mostly acquired) on-premise and hosted products. Some are friendly to creative marketers; some are not. Some offer highly advanced features; some do not. To be fair, the other three vendors mentioned here push the same myth.

IBM

Big Blue likes to tell itself that it can solve any MarTech challenge that you could throw at them. This is partly true, but mostly mythical.

IBM surely sells a lot of digital marketing tools. In fact so many tools that IBM itself often can't tell them apart. Some IBM platforms, like Unica and Cognos, are designed to scale for large B2C environments.

But IBM also has serious gaps in its portfolio, and the firm consistently soft-pedals the amount of services work it takes to customize and integrate its tools into a coherent solution.

Oracle

Oracle has traditionally evolved a kind of hero mythology around the idea of an invincible database. If you build such a database tier, the myth goes, you will simplify the deployment of your user-facing middleware above it. That's why we see "Oracle shops" that make a huge investment in database tooling and then adopt the firm's business software almost as an afterthought.

Unfortunately, Oracle's business software is not so heroic. This is particularly true of the firm's MarTech suite, which is an unusual conglomeration of acquired tools and platforms with disjointed user experiences and no apparent center of gravity.

Salesforce

Salesforce likes to tell itself that its cloud model enables them to offer dynamic, fast-evolving solutions for sales and marketing teams.

In reality, outside of its Sales Cloud, Salesforce has struggled a bit to innovate, and tends to acquire other vendors rather than significantly enhance its own marketing suite. This acquisition model has proven tricky, because Salesforce's cloud architecture (which predates public cloud players like Amazon) is quite proprietary and quirky — not an easy base on which to bolt other solutions (c.f., ExactTarget).

Salesforce excels in delivering services to enterprise employees (i.e., salespeople), but the company cannot boast the same consistency in delivering public-facing solutions.

What You Should Do

Myths are important because they allow cultures and institutions to share common stories. They often have a foundation in the truth, but in a commercial context, they can become quite disconnected from reality.

If you think marketing technology is important, then you'll want to keep it real. RSG can support you. Ping one of RSG's customer advisors for more details.

Our customers say...

"Finally, a review of MarTech suites that takes a critical look at these tools. I found it essential to understanding the promise of these solutions -- as well as some important tool and vendor weaknesses."

Other posts about Salesforce

Like Microsoft, Salesforce has struggled to convert its employee-facing systems into effective customer-facing systems. Our research has found that enterprise licensees have encountered some nasty surprises around...

We just released an advisory paper "Contrasting the Major Marketing Clouds" for RSG research subscribers. This brief is an excellent way for marketing / technology executives to quickly gain a comparative understanding of the leading marketing clouds....

Oracle has done this before; at some point in time, they had four or five different Portal products. However, it took a really long time for them to actually consolidate and integrate multiple offerings. So while it may be a good thing to get different options from one single vendor...